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modernism, which had a brilliant initial flare in America during
the twenties; latecomers to Marxism, which they experienced in
a time of disintegration and shame; latecomers to immigrant
Jewish life, which by now had just enough vitality left to propel
them into the gentile world. And with the indigenous strands of
American culture they were also uneasy: with the Emersonian
tradition of the romantic sublime, with the popular colloquial–
ism of Twain, with the moral stances of native intellectuals like
Brooks and Bourne. For a few years the New York writers
established a fruitful relationship with the New Cr.itics and some
of the poets grouped around them. At first this was a tie of
opposition, and then, an opposition modulated into mutual
influence and even friendship. It seems significant that the New
Critics were also a provincial group, drawn from a part of the
country that also felt neglected, and committed to a view of both
society and culture that was at many points also in conflict with
dominant American values.
The New York writers have not had a major impact on
American literature. There are, to be sure, the "American Jewish
writers," figures like Schwartz, Bellow, Malamud, but the life of
this school, if it is one, seems likely to be short. Its main impetus,
as well as its main themes and settings, comes from the immi–
grant Jewish experience; and that experience is now at an end.
Writers like Bellow and Malamud arose, more or less indepen–
dently, from the kinds of social and cultural milieu that the New
York writers came from; later, to an extent they have not always
cared to acknowledge, they were influenced by the distinctive
Partisan
tone, as mimicry, manifesto, and parody. Nevertheless,
I think the dominant line of American fiction cont.inues to be
that of the native isolates, autodidacts, oddballs, and cranks,
releasing the American genius for gloomy comedy and elegaic
pastoral. Not the powerful divergence of Southern conscious–
ness, not the outcries of black suffering and fury, not the raspy
Jewish mixture of street raciness and high culture mandarin–
none of these has yet shown itself to be as enduring and deep–
rooted as the tradition of native isolates.
As for poetry, the New York writers seem to have had some
effect on a few older poets-Lowell, Berryman , Jarrell, perhaps
